Many businesses print and mail documents to customers on a periodic basis. For example, account statements are often generated on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Account statements such as credit card statements typically summarize customer account activity occurring during the period of time covered by the statements.
Given the large number of customers that are served by a particular business, the amount of customer data that is stored over time can be voluminous and unwieldy. As a result, businesses often maintain the customer data for a limited period of time after which the data is purged from storage. As a result, the data associated with any given customer is typically available only for the limited period of time during which the data is stored.